Merry Christmas Bungie Community!

"Well I really wanted to do something Christmas oriented this year. After being apart of this Community for close to seven years, I found this past year or two I became really involved, and began to have a strong passion for not just the place, but also the people I began to meet and the members in general. Considering the time of year we're in, I thought I would try and spread some good spirit and joy to everyone else around here and share with you this video, I made... Well for all of you. :)"

Arby 'n' the Chief S3E05: "Showdown"

It's on. Handing Master Chief beer after beer to help psyche him up, the Arbiter stands alongside Master Chief during his showdown against Craig, a cocky MLG player. However, the Arbiter has a plan to tip the scales in Master Chief's favor.YouTube - Arby 'n' the Chief S3E05: "Showdown"

Mindless Contest!

Have you lost yours?

Over at Mindless Distortion A10M1C is hosting a holiday Halo 3 screen shot contest for the hook up with Xbox Live. Check the details;

*Create an UNEDITED Holiday Themed Halo 3 Screenshot
*You must send a link to your screenshot. By that, I mean a Bungie.net recent screenshots link, not some imageshack link.
*Entries must be sent in by Friday, December 26th @ 11:59pm (Central Time)
*Entries must have been made between now and December 26th, no screens from a year ago.
*One entry per person
*Email me at Mindless_Distortion@yahoo.com if you have any questions.
Send entries to atomicsblog@yahoo.com. Please include your (valid) gamertag and a link to your File Share along with the name of the base screenshot.

Get your screen shot on for a chance to win 6 months of Xbox Live service and a new gold account. Check the blog here for further reading.

Master Chief Under My Christmas Tree

"Wrap him up in a big red bow."

Bryan Simon's new song is one part letter to Santa with his Christmas wishlist and one part love letter to Master Chief. I'm sure there's enough Master Chief to go around this year. Hopefully, Bryan's been a good boy.

2008 Best of Halo Awards

Hawty McBloggy dropped in to remind us that she's still accepting nominations for the 2008 Best of Halo Awards. If you have sweet content you think should be in the running, or know someone whose work shouldn't go unnoticed, hit the link below and let Hawty know about it.

Happy Halodays

"Those of you who are creatures of habit, please brace yourselves because I am putting our customary Friday Caption Fun antics on hold so we can instead do a fun holiday-themed activity. My vision is for us to create the biggest and bestest Halo and holiday mashup collection ever known to man. I can’t accomplish this by myself so I need all of you to contribute something! Here are a few different suggestions of things you can do:

* Make a holiday-themed Mister Chief in Paint
* Rewrite a traditional Christmas carol with Halo-themed lyrics
* Create an original holiday-themed screenshot
* Find an already existing holiday-themed screenshot on b.net and caption it
* Write a Halo-themed holiday joke
* Design a holiday-themed avatar for your Halo 3 character and write instructions on how to make it
* Make a holiday-themed Halo wallpaper
* Create absolutely anything Halo/holiday related!"

Get Your Brawl On

Legendary, Double EXP style.

Starting 11am PDT yesterday and continuing until Monday the 22nd at 2am PDT, Legendary Brawl is the method by which you will earn twice the EXP. That's right, hit me two times. The Legendary Brawl Double EXP weekend started in earnest yesterday, so if this news is tipping you off to its existence, you might want to rush home and get playing, you're already a day behind.

Legendary Brawl Double EXP weekend requires the Legendary Map Pack, available on
Xbox Live Marketplace. Makes a great stocking stuffer.

Happy Halodays Screenshot Contest

"HaloBabies.net has been running a themed screenshot contest since the beginning of December, and there are still two more weeks to enter in the final two rounds! Looking for some free MS Points, or possibly free games? Read the rules, and submit your best screenshot to enter.

Each round winner will receive 1600 MS Points. Grand prize winner wins the Xbox 360 game of their choice! Current remaining rounds:

Round 3: Theme is Christmas

Round 4: Theme is New Years

Get submitting now, as Round 3 ends this Sunday night, and round 4 the following Sunday!"

The Gamer Girlfriend

"Don't ever let her go."

If you can get her to play Halo with you, that is.

G Spot28 from 411mania.com wrote in to tip us off to a new series of articles he's running where gamers' girlfriends sit down, play titles, and then give tips on how you can make the experience a good one for your significant other. First up, Halo.

Turns out the lovely lady in the article didn't have such a good time with her playthrough. 5 out of 10? No replay value? Looks like Andi's gift grab bag must have gotten lost in the mail. Oh well, girls are icky. You know it. I know it. Hit the link below for the evidence.

'Halo Community Live'

Looks like some pretty prominent Halo community folks and content creators are putting on a live show on December 30th, and you've been invited. Scroll for tons of details and a link to the venue.

"HCL is a very special upcoming event. Imagine "Saturday Night Live" but made by the Halo community, for the Halo community. The show will be hosted by Random Sauce (from "Halo 3 Mythbusters) and MCQ22. The footage will be mostly prerecorded, and then streamed live. The event will be broadcast through Mogulus, a very easy to use website.

The show will consist of machinima shorts, interviews with some big names from the community, and a few special surprises. There will be a chat room as well so you can laugh along with your buddies, and the best part is that you don't even have to register to use it."

Real7alk Halo Screenshot Contest

If you don't think all of the items on your holiday wishlist are going to get checked this year, why not head on over to the newly enhanced Real7alk Halo 3 community site where a pretty sweet screenshot contest has been announced. You might net yourself a custom iPod Nano.

Keep in mind, we're not officially involved. If your Nano turns out to be a deck of cards with a picture of Coldplay taped to the front, don't come crooning to us.

From Real 7alk:

"Well, you guys will be flexing your skills mano o mano for a brand spankin' new 8GB iPod Nano. In orange, of course, with Real 7alk etched on the back.

The theme chosen for this contest is simple: make a picture. But wait, there's a catch! (There's always a catch). The picture must be Halo-based, and must, in some way, represent Real 7alk. How you do so is up to you. You can forge a screen shot. You can Take a picture, photoshop the hell out of it, add text, whatever. You can hand draw something Halo-based. Make Halo-esque props and snap a picture of yourself. But remember, it must in some way represent Real 7alk whether through words, or picture. If you have to explain how, it's probably not good enough.

Chronicles of ODS Steve #6

Steve has some explaining to do to the squad. If the joke flies over your head, you might wanna jump back a few episodes in the series and read the comments complaining about ODS Steve's lack of adherence to realistic aerodynamics.

Ascendant Justice - Hindsight Halo 3

Going out...with a bang.

Cocopjojo from Ascendant Justice has published the final examination in the Hindsight: Halo 3 series. This time out, his eagle-eyed gaze and laser-focused mind zoom in on the final level, Halo. While you might have made the last leg run many times, trust us, you've missed some pretty interesting bits of information.

Once again, Bungie's own illustrious designer, Dan Miller, lent a few of his words to the article. Check it out.

Forge Hub's Favorite Files Updated

Finding flexibility in Forge.

Week Two of Forge Hub's Community Spotlight is up a touch early this week. We know you've been waiting to see what they have in store.

The folks over at Forge Hub have a lot to say about the tool's functionality. This week they speak a bit about the map, Aperture, forged by member Matty, and go on to craft a short wishlist of features that they would love to see implemented in Halo 3's Forge. In several cases they have already implemented some "new features" in some form or fashion by bending the parameters of our title to their will. Before you take our Spotlight as a tacit admission of support for these "workarounds," stop: we can't, we don't, and we won't ever support manipulated maps and gametypes in our Matchmaking experience. For too many reasons to list, map and gametypes that operate outside of the established Forge parameters simply can't be injected into the official Halo 3 multiplayer experience.

Crummy but necessary verbatim out of the way, let's dig into the Q&A.

Q. What inspired your creation?

A. When I designed Aperture, I wanted to create something that would be incredibly versatile, and would still use the entire space offered by Foundry. My ideas originated from other maps I had seen like Bastion, Xyience, and Industries. I wanted a map that had the varied strategies that Bastion offered, produced interactions between high and low points as Xyience did, but also had the gametype versatility that Industries supported.

Q. How long did it take to create?

A. Although the map was made relatively quickly, I spent a very long time thinking through what I wanted to achieve - something that would not only support teamwork and strategies, but promote and positively influence them. From there I began designing different areas of the map, and thought through how they would interact with each other. I needed to make sure that nowhere would players have access to the kind of permanent cover that could stall fights. I wanted people to feel they had to stay on the move to prevail, constantly re-evaluating their position and that of their team. Eventually I came up with a design that allowed for plenty of options, and maintained the traditional sense of high points offering lines of sight but sacrificing cover, and lower points offering more seclusion but restricted access to power weapons.

Q. What aspect took the longest to get right?

A. I found the middle section of the map to be the most challenging. I wanted to maintain the simplistic feel that I had tried hard to create in other areas. I wanted to provide cover against higher points of the map, but I didn't want to block lines of sight from one high point to another. One of the things I wanted most was for the towers to sight each other, most clearly at their highest points. This created some intense sniper battles at the beginning of a game, much like in The Pit. In the end I created a very simple shape, offering a 'landing pad' for each Mancannon; angled Corner Walls forming a slope to utilize as cover, and a central staircase which can be used to access both central meeting points on the map, the higher one by use of a Grenade or Gravity Hammer jump.

Q. How could The Forge be improved?

A. We'd like to see more flexibility and customization within Forge, a few enhancements to the options pallet. The ability to switch object-pathing on and off would make interlocking and geo-merging significantly easier and more versatile, allowing for more precise placement and retaining the visual guidelines of other objects. Expansion of the respawn time options would also be great, particularly the ability to set objects to spawn out as opposed to in. Being able to, say, set an object to spawn at the start of a round then disappear 30 seconds in would give more variety to timed events and increase the options with switch systems. A revision of the budget system would also increase building options a lot, since the individual item limits make building within the overall budget more prone to compromise. We'd like to be able to place as many of a given object as possible within the overall budget, it would significantly increase the options for building structures exactly the way you want them. Alongside these expansions of some glitches, we'd also like to see the removal of others. The way some objects move slightly after saving and loading up the map again hinders interlocking and the pursuit of that oh-so-smooth surface, and the tendency of objects to delete themselves when saving with more than one member in the party over Xbox Live. A similar flaw we'd like to see smoothed out is that if some of the objects are set not to spawn or have not appeared yet upon saving, they will sometimes disappear.

Thanks to Forge Hub for taking the time to visit with us. We're not entirely sure what stuff like "object-pathing" is - the folks at Forge Hub have become so technical in their approach to Forgery that they've invented their own lexicon to describe things like Z-buffering and collision detection. Pretty wild. They definitely take this stuff seriously. And so do we. While we understand the desire to have a much more robust and detailed tool, we designed Forge with the entire player base in mind. There's a delicate balance that has to be maintained between functionality and usability. That said, we're excited to see Forge Hub make use of the toolset as best as they can, and we certainly hear their call for a more robust feature set.

The time for wordsmithing is over. It's time to check out Forge Hub's sweet week two content, ready and waiting to be queued up for download from Bungie Favorites.

Til Death Do Us Part

Last week we got word that a couple of coupling Halo players were celebrating their nuptials with a Halo-themed wedding. Today, we have a montage made by a couple that's already tied their knot. The intro clocks in at one minute, but once it gets going there's some nice editing and sweet synchronization with the score. Check it out.

'Best of i <3 Halo 3 Screenshots' - V3

The third entry in the 'Best of Halo 3 Screenshots" series is up and ready for your discerning eyes over at i <3 halo 3 screenshots. Hit the link below the video to check out the previous entries and browse the site for sweet screens.

Average Joe - Tyrant

Mythical Musings.

Daniel Morris is no stranger to our digital domain - we've highlighted his Mythic Walkthroughs before.But in the spirit of exploration, we wanted to delve a little bit deeper into the man, the myth, the legend to see if we could figure out what makes him tick. And we figured we'd go ahead and let you in on our findings. If you ever wanted to learn what goes on in the mind of a man who has completed Halo 3, solo, with every skull on and in full effect, put your index finger on the mouse wheel and give it a good spin.

Q. Who are you and what do you do?

A. HBO has dubbed me as Daniel “Tyrant” Morris. Its got a ring to it. Full time I work at a law firm in Washington DC as their “tech guy”. I love building and fixing computers and have been doing it for years, but my true passion is in writing. That I’ve been doing since I was 7. Coincidence? Hmm…

Q. An IT guy for a law firm in DC? That does sound quite tyrannical. Where did you pick up such a relevant nickname?

A. In high school, I was able to use the school’s studio and resources to pull together a film I had written. The Tyrant, an alien cyborg, was the villain. I played the part. Let’s face it. Being the bad guy is just plain fun, lol. With a cast of over 200 (both students & teachers), they started calling me “Tyrant” even off the set. The name has stuck with me ever since.

Q. Cybernetics help explain the Mythic Walkthrough. When you're not systematically dissecting Halo 3 at its most difficult, where can we find you hanging out online?

A. Mainly the Halo 3 Forum. While I’m a huge fan of the PC variants of Halo, the Halo 3 forum has a very unique community attached to it. It’s awesome to be able to visit a place on a daily basis that is overwhelmed with a plethora of members who share the same passion. Despite what some may say, I’ve found the community to be very open, supportive, and full of ideas. That’s what keeps me coming back for more.

Q. And what keeps you coming back for more gaming?

A. While I do place a high value in a game’s plot, replay-factor is the trait I hold most high. Very few game titles can keep me interested for very long. While there aren’t a lot of local people I game with, my brother more than makes up for it. After seven years of hardcore training, he still kicks my butt in customs. What can I say? I like a challenge.

Q. What was the first Bungie title you took on?

A. Halo Combat Evolved was not only the first Bungie title I played, but was the whole reason I bought and Xbox and ultimately a 360. My brother turned me onto it, and the moment I set foot on the ring-world for the first time, I was hooked. The battles were totally unpredictable and gave the game so much replay value that I still play it today on the PC. The immense environments, the comical yet useful allies, and the menacing enemies all played a major role in what has come to be an addiction. I became glued to the campaign experience long before multiplayer. To this day I still believe that campaign is the true heart of Halo. Since the close of the trilogy, I’ve been dying to play Marathon. Now I just need an Apple computer.

A. To be honest, a year ago I didn’t think I’d be this involved, nor did I believe that the Mythic challenge would ever go this far. It started out as a personal challenge, just like playing the original game and its sequel on Legendary, but the feeling obtained from completing it was priceless. It surprised me that so few had actually taken the initiative to try, and I wanted others to experience it too. Sounds sappy, I know, but the only thing more fun than doing something like this is doing it with friends.

Q. Does that same sense of initiate drive you to get involved with any other online communities?

A. Since I fear the wrath of the slingshot, I’m just going to say no.

Q. Only our enemies need to be frightened, Daniel. Anything you would like to add? Wanna make a shout-out?

A. A special shout out goes to all my friends and supporters in the community who have gone vastly out of their way to make the Mythic experience better for everyone. Louis Wu, VincentKurayama, Pahat Pojat, Ur Television, SonicJohn, DarkDEVASTAT10N, Shadowstrike, KrypticKiller, Gazas, and my brother K@os stand out in particular for making the Mythic experience better for everyone. Thank you guys for all your continuous help and support. And thank you, Bungie!

Ah, making the experience better for everyone. That's why you're here, Daniel. Thanks for taking time out to answer our round of questions. For those looking for a little more challenge out of their Halo 3 campaign experience, we suggest you hit the link at the top of the article and test your mettle. Or, if you're looking from a monthly challenge and the chance to win cash and prizes (okay, there's no cash at stake, only Microsoft Points), check out The Tyrant's Monthly Mythic Challenge.

MLG/ESPN Top Ten #13

"That's just ridiculous."

"Ten more of the top plays in Halo 3, coming at you with some follow-up plays from previous top tens. Think you can one-up them? Submit your clips at mlgpro.com/topten to make it into the next episode!"